“And the Oscar goes to . . . Kendra’s new boyfriend, Jeremy, for his performance as Guy Who Is Interested in College Sports as Much as Her Father Is.’ ”
Cartoon by Asher Perlman
2026-03-13 22:06:01
2026-03-13 19:06:02
In the year 2000, a team of Yale researchers published a surprising paper. The team had given ketamine, a mind-altering drug that is normally used to anesthetize patients during surgery, to ten people with depression. All but one reported a marked improvement in their symptoms after one dose. Curiously, the antidepressant effect emerged after the mind-altering experiences and persisted for more than a week, suggesting that ketamine might be doing more than making the patients trip. Around the same time, researchers at Johns Hopkins gave volunteers psilocybin, the active component in hallucinogenic mushrooms, to study its psychological effects. The U.S. has treated psilocybin as an illegal Schedule I substance for more than half a century, but, fourteen months after the experiment, many participants considered it one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives—akin to the birth of a child.
A chemical neuroscientist named David Olson, then a graduate student at Stanford, told me that he encountered these studies and was “struck by the ability of a substance, with a single dose, to have such long-lasting effects.” He wanted to know how the drugs worked. He followed closely as researchers began investigating the effects of mind-altering substances on depression, anxiety, substance-use disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other conditions. These studies often identified positive results, sometimes marked ones, and they sparked discussions about a new mental-health paradigm. Might we one day take psychedelics as a kind of therapy? How would clinicians safely prescribe substances that change our perceptions, thoughts, and moods? And perhaps the most perplexing question of all: Why would such drugs make us feel better in the first place?
An important clue came in 2010, when another team at Yale published a study of how ketamine affected the brain cells of rats. In the prefrontal cortex, which regulates mood, the drug seemed to prompt brain cells to grow new branch-like projections that help neurons connect with one another. These projections, known as dendritic spines, typically develop as we learn, gain skills, and experience new things, and their growth contributes to what scientists call neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to change structurally and functionally over time. Stress and depression, meanwhile, can make them wither like dying trees—especially in the prefrontal cortex. (New dendrites aren’t always a good thing; part of cocaine’s addictiveness is thought to come from excessive growth in the brain’s reward centers.) Before administering the ketamine to the rats, the Yale researchers induced symptoms of depression by subjecting the animals to grim protocols such as “learned helplessness” and a “forced swim test.” The drug not only bolstered dendrites but also improved the rats’ behaviors. Yet when the researchers blocked key proteins involved in dendritic growth, the improvements disappeared—a suggestion that the drug’s mental-health effects might depend on the growth.
Olson designed similar experiments with several psychoactive drugs: psilocin (the active form of psilocybin), LSD, DMT, MDMA. In a 2018 paper, he and several colleagues reported that all of these substances spurred dendrite growth in isolated neurons in a dish. When they dosed fruit flies with LSD, they observed a similar neural response. The researchers then injected DMT into live rodents. Twenty-four hours later, changes were readily apparent in the prefrontal cortex. In several microscope images included in the paper, the rodent neurons look like newly fertilized trees.
Advocates of psychedelic therapy have long argued that altered mental states help explain whatever therapeutic effects these drugs have. Roland Griffiths, who oversaw the Johns Hopkins study of psilocybin, believed that the drug helped people because it sparked mystical experiences. “Very often, people report these experiences to be the most personally meaningful, personally insightful, of their entire lifetime,” he told me before his death in 2023. (Indeed, when Michael Pollan wrote about Griffiths for this magazine, in 2015, his story was titled “The Trip Treatment.”) Olson had a different hypothesis: What if the most important effect of these drugs is not on the mind but on the brain?
Olson became convinced that scientists could take the psychedelic effects out of psychedelic drugs—without sacrificing many of the mental-health benefits. This is a provocative view. “I don’t really buy the basic argument that you can remove the trip entirely and get the therapeutic response,” Robin Carhart-Harris, a psychedelics researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, told me. Carhart-Harris has used fMRI scans to document changes in brain activity that occur during psychedelic experiences. “Imagine the brain’s activity patterns like a snow globe that has settled,” he has said. “Psychedelics shake the snow globe, disrupting these patterns and allowing for new ones to form.” In his telling, a trip is just what you feel when the globe shakes; skip the trip and your brain remains stuck in its patterns.
In 2019, Olson co-founded a company called Delix Therapeutics, which says that its “singular focus is pushing the boundaries of neuroscience to treat conditions of the brain.” His academic research takes place at the University of California, Davis, where I went to visit him in his laboratory. He started to make his case by sketching the structure of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that regulates mood, on a piece of paper. He drew two geometric rings, with groups of atoms branching out. Then he pencilled in some methyl groups—CH3—and moved a single oxygen atom from one carbon to another. “That’s psilocin,” he said.
Olson erased the oxygen. Now the molecule was DMT, which causes an extremely intense but relatively short trip. “Small structural changes make a huge difference,” he explained. Finally, he transposed the nitrogen and carbon rings from one position to another. In terms of the molecule’s over-all shape, it was nearly identical to DMT. “If you held models in your hands, you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart,” Olson said. “But they have very different effects.” In rodent experiments, both molecules promote dendritic growth in the prefrontal cortex. This last molecule, however, wasn’t hallucinogenic.
When Olson was at Stanford, he learned from a mentor who had honed a new method for developing drugs: function-oriented synthesis. Within a given molecule, specific groups of atoms could be catalogued according to their individual effects on the body. If you determined which group did what, then you could potentially synthesize a compound that isolates what you wanted, leaving out the rest. “It’s a very reductionist approach,” Olson said. He compared a chemist using this method to a mechanic working on a car. “It’s got all these complex parts,” he said. But those parts can be grouped by function—axles go in this bin, spark plugs go in that bin—and you could change the car’s performance by adjusting its components. Olson’s theory was that one part of a psychedelic molecule caused a trip, while another stimulated dendritic growth. If he could remove some of the former but preserve a little of the latter, then he might have a recipe for a non-psychedelic psychedelic medicine.
Olson, who has a shaved head and piercing eyes, showed me how the scientists in his lab break psychedelic molecules into parts, as though they’re cars in a chop shop, and build new ones. There were beakers everywhere, full of chemical reagents such as sodium hydrosulfite and inorganic bases. We walked by liquid-chromatography machines and hulking specimen freezers. Graduate students in tie-dye shirts worked under fume hoods; on the glass that protected them from chemicals, synthesis reactions were scribbled in black marker. One researcher, Andrian Basargin, explained that he was making a substructure of LSD in an acetone and dry-ice bath. It would become a component in a new compound, which would then be taken for a test drive.
Olson got hints on where to begin from an odd pair of books by Alexander and Ann Shulgin: “PiHKAL,” short for “Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved,” and “TiHKAL: The Continuation,” short for “Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved.” Alexander was a chemist who, beginning in the nineteen-sixties, created nearly two hundred novel chemical compounds, many of them psychedelic, and tested some of them on himself. The books contain extensive notes on the drugs’ synthesis and effects. Olson tasked a grad student with reading the books and cross-referencing drug forums on Reddit—“kind of a weird thing,” he admitted. He wanted to know which of Shulgin’s concoctions didn’t produce much of a trip. “Some of the first molecules we made were informed by procedures from those books,” he told me.
A long trial-and-error process gave Olson a sense of which molecular motifs seemed likely to cause mind-altering effects. “You make a change, you do a round of testing, then you see, Oh, this change takes us closer to where we want to be,” he said. He showed me a large black box about the size of an industrial printer. Inside were lab-grown cells studded with modified receptors. A new substance would be squirted over the cells, Olson explained. If the molecule was likely to have hallucinogenic properties, it would trigger a fluorescence reaction that sensors in the box would detect. This helped the team weed out trippy compounds. In this way, for example, the team discovered that flipping two atoms within the LSD molecule—Olson compared the change to a tire rotation—affected how hallucinogenic it was. To confirm these findings, this new compound was also tested on rodents.
If a molecule passed these tests, the next step was to determine whether it stimulated the growth of dendrites. In another lab across Davis’s leafy campus, we met John Gray, a neuroscientist who tested experimental drugs on living neurons. Slices of mouse brain floated in dishes of synthetic cerebrospinal fluid; on a monitor, I could see a single teardrop-shaped neuron. I watched through a microscope as a postdoc, Raghava Jagadeesh Salaka, broke through the neuron’s cell membrane with a micropipette. It looked like a needle pricking a dollop of translucent jelly.
The micropipette allowed the researchers to measure electrical activity in the neuron, Gray explained. Blue spikes, which suggested increased signalling and connectivity, soon appeared on another computer monitor. The team also looked for physical changes. After exposing neurons to a compound, they used a microscope to count any new dendritic spines that had popped up.
Olson eventually found a substance that did not seem to be hallucinogenic but potently stimulated growth in the cortical neurons of rodents. He named the compound zalsupindole; it was similar to the variant of DMT that he’d sketched for me in his lab. He felt he needed a term for this new category of drug, so a classics professor at Davis helped him come up with “psychoplastogen,” from the Greek roots psych (“mind”) and plast (“molding”). Delix, the company that he co-founded, tends to use the term “neuroplastogens,” which emphasizes the impact on the brain rather than on the mind. I asked Olson what he thought it might be like for a person to take it. “Well, we started clinical trials two weeks ago,” he told me.
In December, Delix Therapeutics presented the results of what it called the first human clinical trial of a neuroplastogen. Eighteen patients with major depression were treated with zalsupindole for one week in a monitored setting. There were no significant safety concerns, and the team confirmed that the drug has no subjective effects. “Definitely, without a doubt, it is not hallucinogenic,” Olson said. Although the study was designed primarily to establish safety, almost all of the participants reported substantial improvements in their symptoms for at least a month. Two participants mentioned that their depression had abated completely. Edward Sellers, an emeritus professor at the University of Toronto and an expert on pharmacology who is not affiliated with Delix, told me that results were “encouraging but inconclusive.” He stressed that the trial was limited by its small size, its lack of a placebo control, and the fact that participants knew what they were taking. But it was enough to convince the Food and Drug Administration to approve a larger, placebo-controlled study in the coming years and to allow participants to take the drug at home.
Many of the scientists I consulted for this story predicted that Olson’s approach would not be effective. “I think it’s really far-fetched,” Griffiths told me, in 2023. His emphasis on mystical experiences—often featuring an “authoritative sense of unity or connectedness,” “positively valenced feelings such as love or peace,” and a sensation of “oceanic boundlessness”—has heavily influenced psychedelic research. In 2022, a review of twelve studies of psychedelic therapies for depression, cancer-related distress, and substance-use disorders found a significant association between mystical experiences and mental-health benefits. (It also warned that studies tend to be small, unrepresentative of the wider population, and susceptible to bias.) Many researchers believe that removing the mind-altering effects from psychedelic drugs would undermine any benefits. “The evidence suggests that, in doing so, you’re just going to engineer out the therapeutic effect,” Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told me.
Carhart-Harris, at U.C.S.F., is skeptical that mystical experiences can fully explain why psychedelic drugs help people with depression. “If you look up mystical in the dictionary, you see supernatural, and that’s a problem in my view,” he told me. But his brain-imaging studies suggest that, during a psychedelic trip, communication between different regions of the brain becomes far less constrained than during normal consciousness, allowing new ways of thinking to emerge. Zalsupindole might not produce those effects. Other research has found that psychedelic trips elicit psychological insights and emotional breakthroughs, which are strong predictors of a therapeutic response. “It’s not magic,” Carhart-Harris said. “It’s psychology.” David Nichols, a neuroscientist who is an expert on psychedelics, told me about a woman with alcohol-use disorder who realized during a psilocybin trip that her drinking was harming her children and decided to stop. Another patient had a revelation about the origins of his severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, which significantly improved his symptoms. “There is something that happens that is transformative,” Nichols said. “It’s not just the physiological effect of making some dendrites grow.”
Many pharmaceutical companies are betting on neuroplastogens, however. One 2024 analysis, published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, estimated that the field could be worth nearly seven billion dollars by 2030. That same year, AbbVie, one of the largest drug companies in the U.S., signed a deal with Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals, worth roughly $1.95 billion, to develop “novel neuroplastogens.” Another biotech company, Enveric Biosciences, is preparing for human trials of its own non-hallucinogenic analogue of DMT. In September of 2025, the National Institute on Drug Abuse awarded a grant worth up to $11.4 million to atai Life Sciences to develop similar drugs. Neuroplastogens are “quietly redefining the psychedelic medicine narrative,” according to “Microdose,” an industry newsletter. “The result is a shift that feels less like a cultural movement and more like a return to classic pharmaceutical logic, just with radically new science underneath.”
“If you absolutely need the hallucinogenic effects, then these new compounds are not going to be the revolution in psychiatry that people are hoping they will be,” Olson told me. Hallucinogens could trigger schizophrenia or a bipolar episode. A family history of these conditions can exclude patients from treatment. Psychedelic treatment protocols are also resource-intensive, and can involve multiple lengthy sessions with trained facilitators that may not be covered by insurance. In Oregon, where psilocybin therapy was legalized in 2023, a third of new clinics have already closed owing to high operating expenses and treatment costs. There have also been reports of facilitators taking advantage of patients while they were under the influence of mind-altering drugs. Neuroplastogens would fit much more comfortably in the existing apparatus for drug development, regulation, and distribution, without the cultural baggage. “I’ve faced significant criticism for creating non-hallucinogenic analogues of psychedelics,” Olson said. “But why wouldn’t you want to try this, to help as many people as possible?”
Even the skeptics are paying close attention. David Yaden, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins whose official title is the Roland Griffiths Professor of Psychedelic Research, described the development of neuroplastogens as a grand experiment. “Scientifically, I’m interested in the question of whether the trip matters,” he told me. Non-psychedelic neuroplastogens may test that question with a new level of specificity. “If it was all just castles in the sky, and the acute subjective effects don’t matter, that would be really interesting,” Yaden went on. “It would undermine my entire perspective.” If that turns out to be the case, he’s open to changing his mind. ♦
2026-03-13 19:06:02
Two weeks after the United States and Israel launched an air war on Iran, there has been no let up in the conflict—or its financial repercussions. On Thursday, Iran’s new Supreme Leader said that his country would keep closed the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane through which about a fifth of the world’s oil flows, and more vessels in the Persian Gulf were attacked, including two oil tankers that were set ablaze off the coast of Iraq. On world markets, the price of a barrel of crude jumped to more than a hundred dollars.
Here in the U.S., the price of gasoline has risen by about more than twenty per cent since the war began, and energy analysts warn that it could rise a lot further if the Strait isn’t reopened. The Dow has fallen by about four per cent. Donald Trump, having plunged the country into a potentially disastrous war, with no clear rationale or exit plan, is flailing around for ways to mitigate its economic consequences. On Thursday, he suggested in a social-media post that the U.S., as the world’s largest oil producer, makes a lot of money when prices go up—an argument that even the most slavish G.O.P. congressman facing a reëlection campaign might hesitate to embrace.
Perhaps the most startling thing about the whole situation is that the Trump Administration was apparently surprised by, and unprepared for, Iran’s capability to inflict economic pain on the U.S. and its allies. This despite the fact that during a showdown in Trump’s first term the regime in Tehran used the same tactics of threatening to block the Strait and of attacking oil infrastructure in neighboring Gulf states that are allied with the U.S. Whether out of arrogance, capriciousness, or collective amnesia, this recent history was ignored.
In 2018, after rashly pulling out of the nuclear deal that the Obama Administration had negotiated, Trump launched a “maximum pressure campaign” against the Islamic Republic, which included extensive sanctions on its oil industry, the country’s biggest revenue generator. The response from Tehran was robust. In February, 2019, the Navy commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said that if Iran had no buyers for its oil it would take military steps to close the Strait. Ultimately, it backed off—it was able to continue exporting oil to China and other countries that ignored the U.S. sanctions—but the government and its foreign proxies did carry out a campaign of aggression in and around the Gulf. In May and June of 2019, four oil tankers docked in the United Arab Emirates were sabotaged and two freight vessels, one Japanese-owned and the other Norwegian-owned, were damaged by Iranian mines in the Gulf of Oman, which sits below the Strait. Months later, in Saudi Arabia, drone attacks struck oil-pumping stations that were operated by Aramco, the state-run oil giant. According to a report from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, Tehran “meant to send a message to the Gulf states that if they continue to encourage the United States to cut off Iran’s oil sector, Iran will take actions to harm their ability to export oil.” The report continued, “The message to the United States is that the ‘maximum pressure’ campaign is not without costs, and if the United States seeks to pursue this approach, Iran will take steps that have a negative impact on the global economy.”
At the time, there was speculation that tensions between the U.S. and Iran could spiral into military conflict—Mike Pompeo, then Trump’s Secretary of State, had described one of Iran’s attacks on Aramco facilities as an “act of war.” The Columbia report considered various scenarios, including small-scale hostilities in the Gulf and a major war that closed the Strait of Hormuz and drew in other countries in the region. In the latter scenario, the price of a barrel of crude could spike up from sixty-five dollars to “$110–$170 after one month, $95–$125 after six months,” the report said. The good news, it went on, was that “none of the parties are interested in pursuing massive escalation and have shown little will to do so even as the crisis in the region has worsened.”
Enter Trump 2.0, whose addled mind seems to have difficulty keeping a thought in place for a few days, let alone for the six years that have passed since the previous showdown in the Gulf. A few weeks ago, in his State of the Union address, Trump pointed out how the price of a gallon of gasoline “reached a peak of over six dollars a gallon in some states under my predecessor—it was, quite honestly, a disaster.” Three days later, Trump signed the order for Operation Epic Fury, with eminently predictable results. Having survived the initial U.S.-Israeli onslaught, the Iranian regime rolled out an expanded version of its playbook from 2019, exploiting its choke hold on the Strait, while launching missile and drone attacks on U.S. bases and energy infrastructure in the Gulf states.
With the Strait effectively blocked and hundreds of tankers stranded, many millions of barrels of oil are stuck at sea. And as onshore storage facilities have filled up Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Kuwait have shut off some of their wells because they have nowhere to put the oil they produce. In volume terms, the hit to global supply is now the largest ever, energy analysts say, and, the longer the conflict goes on, the worse it will get. On an corporate earnings call last week, Amin Nasser, the chief executive of Aramco, said that a lengthy closure of the Strait would have “catastrophic consequences” for the world’s oil markets. Gas prices haven’t hit six dollars yet, but in parts of California they have come close. At a national level, the average price has risen from $2.94 a month ago to about $3.60, according to the American Automobile Association.
Last week, Trump floated the idea of the U.S. government providing insurance contracts to vessels to sail through the Strait—a proposal that seems to be in limbo. On Wednesday, the Paris-based International Energy Agency announced that its members, which include the United States, other Western nations, and their allies, would release more than four hundred million barrels of oil from emergency stocks to alleviate supply disruptions—the biggest such release ever seen. In the circumstances, this was a sensible move, but if the White House had been hoping that it would immediately bring down oil prices it was disappointed. Despite the announcement from the I.E.A., the price of crude closed the day up nearly five per cent.
The previous time that Trump almost blundered into an economic catastrophe was on “Liberation Day,” nearly a year ago, when, from the Rose Garden, he announced punitive tariffs on dozens of U.S. trading partners. Financial markets, including the U.S. bond market, which lies at the heart of the global financial system, promptly went into a tailspin. Fortunately for Trump, two of his top economic aides—Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick—were able to persuade him to back down and pause the tariffs before the cracks in the bond market developed into a full-blown crisis. Subsequently, many of the levies were modified. Thus, the legend of “TACO”—“Trump Always Chickens Out”—was born. (Robert Armstrong, a journalist at the Financial Times, came up with the phrase.) On Wall Street, TACO still has many believers, and not without reason. Trump remains obsessed with the markets. And with the midterms on the horizon the last thing that he and other Republicans want to talk about is higher gas prices.
But it turns out that doing a wartime TACO is considerably harder than doing a peacetime one. The decision to cease hostilities isn’t Trump’s alone; Israel and Iran also have a say. The potential loss of face is much larger: at least seven American service members have been killed in Operation Epic Fury, while more than a hundred have been wounded. And oil wells and refineries can’t be turned back on overnight. “Many processes are out of (Trump’s) hand,” Marko Kolanović, a financial commentator who was formerly co-head of global research at JPMorgan Chase, remarked online last week.
It’s not all bad news for the TACO Man. Among economists, there is a consensus that the U.S. economy is much less vulnerable to higher oil prices than it was in the nineteen-seventies, when two big price spikes that originated in the Middle East both predated deep recessions. Back then, most American families drove gas guzzlers, and manufacturing, which uses a lot of energy, contributed about twice as much to G.D.P. than it does today. In other words, the economy isn’t nearly as energy intensive as it used to be, and, for that reason, most economists don’t believe higher oil prices alone will plunge it into a recession. In 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, energy prices rose to even higher levels than they’ve reached this month, and the U.S. economy kept growing.
The economic optimists present a strong argument, but it isn’t infallible. In 2022, the economy was still rebounding strongly from COVID, with the vestiges of a big fiscal stimulus at its back. In the past year, G.D.P. has continued to rise, but job growth has virtually ceased, raising questions about the economy’s momentum. An extended period of higher energy prices would hit low- and middle-income households, many of which are already struggling to keep up with the cost. It could also feed through to higher inflation, which could prompt the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates on hold, or even raise them. Assuming the Senate confirms Kevin Warsh, Trump’s nominee to replace Jerome Powell as Fed chair, an interest hike seems like an unlikely outcome, but the possibility of the Fed not responding to higher prices also raises awkward possibilities. If investors come to think that the central bank is going soft on inflation, there could be a big sell-off in the bond market. That would leave Trump in the same predicament he was in last year after Liberation Day.
Nothing is certain, except the fact that the President is floundering, making conflicting statements from one day to the next about how long the war will last. As it continues, rule at the whim of a strongman seems to be giving way to rule by slapstick. Growing up in England, I spent countless hours watching the comedies of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, which the BBC showed all the time. In each show, the two nitwits would set out on some caper, which would inevitably go horribly wrong, leaving them broke, or tied up, or in jail, or hanging over a cliff, or some other situation of great peril. At which point, Ollie would turn to Stan and say, “Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”
Trump is turning into Oliver Hardy. Earlier this week, he said that he launched the war based on information he received from Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio that led him to believe Iran was preparing to attack the United States. The search for the fall guy is on. Only the truth is we are all Trump’s fall guys—not just Americans facing higher fuel bills but the inhabitants of other countries, particularly energy-importing ones, such as Japan, Germany, China, and India, which will bear the brunt of higher prices. Hopefully, that will be the full extent of the economic damage caused by Trump’s recklessness. It can’t be guaranteed. ♦
2026-03-13 19:06:02
In 2006, Ryan Gosling, then in his twenties, starred in a tough-minded, low-budget drama called “Half Nelson,” in which he played a middle-school teacher hobbled by a crack addiction. Years later, the actor, now a fully fledged star, blasted off into space; the film was the Neil Armstrong drama “First Man” (2018), and it climaxed with a weepy reconstruction of the 1969 moon landing. Now, in “Project Hail Mary,” Gosling has come full circle: he is Ryland Grace, a middle-school teacher who blasts off into space. There are differences, to be sure. Grace’s destination is the star Tau Ceti, roughly 11.9 light-years from Earth. No crack is smoked; an astronaut’s life has enough highs. (There’s also an onboard vodka stash that doesn’t last long.) Weeping, though, you can count on. Gosling is a beautiful crier, and his character’s journey seems destined to end in tears.
The directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and the screenwriter, Drew Goddard, clearly want us to shed a few of our own. They also want to make us laugh, and their instincts are often at lumpy cross-purposes. Early on, Grace finds himself mourning his two crewmates, Yáo Li-Jie (Ken Leung) and Olesya Ilyukhina (Milana Vayntrub), who have perished mid-journey, leaving him all alone. Grim stuff—or it would be, if not for a vein of humor that throbs here and elsewhere, keeping the full sting of loss at bay. Grace, you see, has just emerged from a years-long induced coma. Looking like the Unabomber, he bumbles and flails about, barely able to remember his name, his mission, or his late colleagues. He delivers patchy eulogies that feel half sad, half jokey, and more than a little half-hearted. Consider Claire Denis’s rather chillier space opera, “High Life” (2018), in which another astronaut (Robert Pattinson) jettisoned his dead crewmates with far less ceremony. He knew he was alone. Not so Grace, who always seems aware of an audience on the other side of the movie screen, waiting to be entertained.
“Project Hail Mary” is the most exasperatingly insistent crowd-pleaser I’ve seen in a while. It serves up an elaborate science-fiction plot in easily digestible bites, often with a juicy one-liner or a side order of pratfall. Both the title and the quippy-wonky tone come from an Andy Weir novel, from 2021, and, like the book, the film uses Grace’s temporary amnesia as a structuring device. We are jerked between past and present as his backstory gets filled in, one jogged memory at a time. Early on, we flash back to Earth, where Grace is teaching junior-high science; his latest lesson is about sound frequencies, and you can rest assured that it will appear on the film’s midterm exam. There’s a pre-apocalyptic chill in the air. The sun is being devoured by energy-hungry microbes, called Astrophage, and the resulting cooling threatens to wipe out much of Earth’s population. This isn’t just a local problem; the Astrophage are eating stars everywhere, like ants at an intergalactic picnic. Lights out for the universe.
Enter Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), a government official with a barbed half smile and a will of iron, who drags Grace back to the world of top-flight science, which he left behind years before, after flaming out of academia. Stratt is the head of Project Hail Mary, a global rescue effort to stop the star-eaters before it’s too late. (One of the film’s most casually poignant touches is its matter-of-fact vision of international coöperation and competent leadership. Talk about science fiction.) A crew will be sent to study Tau Ceti, a star that seems resistant to Astrophage infection. Stratt needs the world’s best minds at her disposal, and Grace is one of them. But he’s reluctant to get involved, and flashbacks reveal the long, improbable arc of how he relents—how this stubborn, self-deprecating oddball, with a doctorate in molecular biology but no astronaut experience, wound up lost in space, with the fate of the world in his nervous grip.
Mercifully, in writing the novel, Weir realized that his Grace was not sufficient for us. And so, not far from Tau Ceti, an enormous alien spacecraft looms into view. In Lord and Miller’s adaptation, it’s an impressively elongated affair—made from a substance called xenonite, though I’d have guessed dry spaghetti noodles—and you can discern, in the aliens’ handiwork, the same whimsical sense of play that animated Lord and Miller’s “Lego Movie” (2014). A bridge extends from ship to ship, and Grace meets a squat, faceless, many-legged creature, like a crustacean made of sandstone. Their first encounter occurs on opposite sides of a transparent wall, and all it takes is an impromptu Marx Brothers routine—Grace gently dances, the alien follows suit—to confirm that they mean each other no harm.
The creature’s language consists largely of gentle, high-pitched squeals, difficult but not impossible to decode, and Grace, using a laptop, manages to fashion a rudimentary system of communication. At last, the alien—brought wonderfully to life, with an amusingly robotic voice and skittery movements, by the puppeteer James Ortiz—can tell his story. He is an engineer from the planet Erid, which is also threatened by Astrophage, and, like Grace, he is the lone survivor of his mission. And so begins a beautiful friendship, one that might save both their planets. “I’m gonna call you Rocky,” Grace says. Presumably, E.T. would have been too obvious.
Nearly every cinematic space voyage, however far flung, brushes up against familiar terrain. If this one reminds you of Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” (2014), that’s no surprise: “Project Hail Mary” is nowhere near as mind-bending, but it has its share of Nolan-esque centrifugal set pieces and conceptual paradoxes. (One nicely circular irony: Grace’s ship is powered by Astrophage. The agent of Earth’s destruction is also the engine of its salvation.) Even more obvious are the echoes of “The Martian” (2015), another wryly funny tale of an astronaut cast adrift that was adapted by Goddard from a Weir novel. But the director there was Ridley Scott, and his streamlined professionalism kept the comic and the cosmic judiciously in check.
Lord and Miller are boisterous funnymen, with a flair for the exaggerated and the outlandish that feels born of their frequent work in animation. (They wrote and directed “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” from 2009, and co-produced the hugely successful “Spider-Verse” franchise.) Even within the live-action spectacle of “Project Hail Mary,” the directors aim for uncharted realms of goofball grandeur, as if they were bent on dramatizing the most serious human enterprise in the least serious manner possible. When Rocky temporarily moves into the earthling ship—unable to handle the new atmosphere, he shields himself inside a dodecahedron-shaped “ball”—he disdains Grace’s untidy habits and other human shortcomings. Grace, in turn, grouses about his new roomie in a series of video diaries, which will be sent back to Earth. “He’s growing on me,” Grace eventually admits, adding, “At least he’s not growing in me.” His companion expresses a more succinct version of the sentiment: “Rocky happy not alone.”
And so we find ourselves in an interspecies buddy comedy: “Smart and Smarter.” The buddies’ plan involves the retrieval of amoeba specimens from a celestial body orbiting Tau Ceti. This planet is a striking piece of production design, with a nicely retro matte-style finish, though it does have a gaseous swirl of pink and green that looks a bit like Planet “Wicked.” Lord and Miller, working with the cinematographer Greig Fraser, avoid the conventional visual language of the prestige space epic, with its sterile surfaces and zero-gravity tracking shots. When Grace first awakens on his ship, the film cuts hectically around, above, and below him, as if to approximate his mental and physical disorientation. But even after the grogginess wears off, there’s little sense of flow to the images; they don’t build or move hypnotically from one to the next, and they suggest a curious reluctance, on the part of the filmmakers, to maximize the possibilities of the big screen. Even their vision of outer space seldom imparts the sense of a terrifying, unknowable vastness.
As obstacles, reversals, and near-death experiences accumulate, the film balloons to two and a half hours—hardly overlong, you might think, for an epic of looming planetary destruction. But the audience’s good will is a precious, unstable resource, and the flippancy of “Project Hail Mary” expends it recklessly. All the more reason to be grateful for Sandra Hüller as Stratt, who keeps pulling the proceedings back to Earth in the best possible way. Hüller’s bone-dry reserve is effortlessly amusing, in a way that Gosling’s more strained antics are not, and Stratt’s prickly bond with Grace, brusque but not unkind, seems to foreshadow his future interactions with Rocky: they, too, must learn to speak the same language. There’s a fleeting yet sublime moment of connection one night, when Stratt, lowering her guard at a bar with her colleagues, croons a gorgeous cover of Harry Styles’s “Sign of the Times.” You have to wonder if the filmmakers were inspired by the actor’s great performance in “Toni Erdmann” (2016), in which she similarly turned a karaoke moment into the stuff of emotional revelation. “We gotta get away from here,” Hüller sings, and rightly so. She’s out of this world. ♦
2026-03-13 19:06:02
A night of dancing, drinking, and crazed debauchery in N.Y.C.? No, not next Saturday at Knockdown Center—it’s “The Wild Party,” Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe’s musicalization of a 1928 poem by Joseph Moncure March, revived this month in New York City Center’s Encores! series (March 18-29). Set during the Roaring Twenties, the show takes place at the Manhattan apartment of Queenie (Jasmine Amy Rogers), a vaudeville bombshell, and her man of the moment, the comedian Burrs (Jordan Donica). Guests include a former prizefighter, a pair of piano-playing twins, an “ambisextrous” playboy, a stage diva past her prime, and someone’s kid sister from Poughkeepsie. Oh, there’s also Queenie’s frenemy Kate (Adrienne Warren), who brings along a hunky plus-one with a roving eye (Jelani Alladin). (Fidelity is so nineteen-tens.)
“The Wild Party” premièred on Broadway in 2000 and ran for an underwhelming two months, despite seven Tony nominations and a cast that included Toni Collette, Mandy Patinkin, and Eartha Kitt. It is not to be confused with Andrew Lippa’s “The Wild Party,” a musical adaptation of the same poem that also premièred in 2000 and also received an Encores! revival, a 2015 staging starring Sutton Foster. That March’s poem is the basis for not one but two musicals is perhaps unsurprising—it offers the seemingly endless allure of a Jazz Age milieu, rendered with a luridness that makes F. Scott Fitzgerald look like Mother Goose.
From the dissonance of the orchestra’s opening peal of brass, LaChiusa’s version signals its allegiance to his source’s snarling tone and, in fact, incorporates many of March’s lines directly into the songs, as in the number introducing its antiheroine: “She liked her lovers violent, and vicious: / Queenie was sexually ambitious.” These are unhappy hedonists, boozing and fornicating for lack of fulfillment. A century on, the party crowd’s arsenal of intoxicants has expanded, and sex has never been more accessible. But fulfillment remains as elusive as ever.—Dan Stahl
Anna Ziegler’s “Antigone (This Play I Read in High School)” reimagines Sophocles’ authority-defying heroine (Susannah Perkins) as a young woman seeking an abortion. The procedure has been outlawed by Antigone’s newly coronated uncle, Creon (Tony Shalhoub), who presides over a playfully anachronistic Thebes, in which the palace gate is a walk-through metal detector manned by a befuddled security officer (Dave Quay, a slapstick virtuoso). Ziegler’s humor and sympathy for her characters—including Creon, who desperately wants to do right by everyone—saves the conflict between individual and state from heavy-handedness. Arresting performances by Perkins, Shalhoub, and Celia Keenan-Bolger, as a one-woman chorus, are anchored by a set that, under Tyne Rafaeli’s slick direction, keeps surprising with its inventiveness.—Dan Stahl (Public Theatre; through April 5.)
The first “Motion/Matter: All-Styles Dance Battle,” at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, in 2024, was the culmination of a festival of street-dance productions. In the past two years, the festival has fallen away, leaving the essential core of battle-culture dance intact: the competition in which soloists define themselves ever more clearly as they rise to the challenge set by other contenders. This year’s panel of judges (including the Litefeet trailblazer Chrybaby Cozie) isn’t quite as starry as the inaugural jury, but the battle, hosted by the comically manic Cebo and the elegant Nubian Néné, should still serve as a concentrated sample of the state of the art.—Brian Seibert (PAC NYC; March 21.)
The experimental singer-producer FKA twigs, for most of her career, has made cerebral electronic music intent on synchronizing the mind and body. A transformative discography—her intimacy-focussed début,“LP1” (2014); her operatic breakup record, “Magdalene” (2019); and her border-hopping pandemic mixtape, “Caprisongs” (2022)—made her a revolutionary figure in both pop and avant-garde spheres. But last year, across two LPs, twigs broke even her own paradigm. “Eusexua,” inspired by the techno scene in Prague, sought music for a euphoric out-of-body experience. Its continuation, “Eusexua Afterglow,” released ten months later, was the score for a blissful post-rave comedown. Together, the albums create a vision of the club as a sanctuary where one can completely detach from the self.—Sheldon Pearce (Madison Square Garden; March 21.)
A shakedown opens Lauren Yee’s “Mother Russia,” directed by Teddy Bergman. Evgeny (Adam Chanler-Berat), deputized by his fixer father, arrives at a St. Petersburg shop to extract money from its proprietor, Dmitri Petrovich (Steven Boyer). A gun is raised, then lowered; boyhood recognition floods in. Soon, the childhood acquaintances are embarking on a surveillance caper, eavesdropping on a dissident pop star (Rebecca Naomi Jones). Yee stretches the comedy in each scene like taffy, but she keeps a scalpel up her sleeve: Mother Russia (David Turner), who embodies the weary soul of her country, hilariously relates the saga of a nation forever ricocheting between tsars and strongmen, purges and pageants.—Rhoda Feng (Pershing Square Signature Center; through March 22.)
Like many of the outstanding shows that the Morgan puts on, this exhibition, centered on the early Caravaggio masterpiece “Boy with a Basket of Fruit” (c. 1595), is given a fantastic context, the better for the viewer to understand the artist, his methods, and why the work continues to resonate. Caravaggio, born and trained in Lombardy, had a creative boldness based on confronting reality. Also included here are brilliant examples of how other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century masters provided samples from the natural world—among them Giuseppe Arcimboldo, in his still scary “Four Seasons in One Head” (c. 1590). It’s a treasure trove of a show, with a lot of emphasis on pleasure.—Hilton Als (Morgan Library & Museum; through April 19.)
The philosopher Adam Smith, in his 1776 text, “The Wealth of Nations,” wrote that musicians have “some of the most frivolous professions.” He would perhaps shudder to learn that, two hundred and fifty years later, his classical-economics opus would be rendered into frivolity by the Bang on a Can co-founder David Lang. Lang’s oratorio of the same name draws lines from Smith’s treatise, and also from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and Edith Wharton—all synthesized to ask, What does it mean to value something? The piece, performed by the Singaporean-British mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron, the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, and the New York Philharmonic Chorus, has its world première under the baton of the orchestra’s soon-to-be director Gustavo Dudamel. Frivolous? I think not.—Jane Bua (David Geffen Hall; March 19-22.)
Rachel Syme explores a Japanese stationer-café.
In 2019, a teeny sliver of a store, specializing in Japanese stationery, opened on Tenth Street in the East Village. The button-size shop, called niconeco zakkaya (fashioned, purposefully, in all lower case), was founded by a paper-goods obsessive named Siming Vautin, who had spent about a decade living in Japan; it had grown out of a successful Etsy store that trafficked in all things kawaii (the Japanese term for cute, or, more specifically, heart-squeezingly adorable). Niconeco zakkaya sells a neatly curated selection of precious little items, including washi tape printed with cats and ladybugs, pastel pencil pouches, diminutive watercolor palettes, rubber stamps of teapots and paper cranes, green-tea-infused writing paper, handmade scented candles, and many more irresistible, if self-consciously twee, impulse purchases. But the shop, which I started visiting regularly a few years ago as a surefire Sunday comfort activity, can quickly become so crowded with human traffic jams that one can barely move through it. Fortunately, last summer, Vautin opened a brand-new outpost in Williamsburg, Loaf on Paper by niconeco zakkaya (64 Grand St.), which is four times the size of the original location. The front half of Loaf on Paper serves as an all-day café, where customers can sip black-sesame lattes, post up reading a novel, and purchase a variety of upscale foods (artisanal berry jams, Brightland olive oil, dark-chocolate-covered medjool dates). The back half of the store, however, is where the fun really begins. Vautin has created a true stationery smorgasbord, stuffed with creamy notebooks, wax seals, fountain pens and inks, wee porcelain bowls, mini-colored-pencil sets, gift wrap, highlighter pens, Hobonichi planners, a bounty of illustrated stickers, and washi-tape rolls by the dozen. I find it impossible to leave empty-handed.
P.S. Good stuff on the internet:
2026-03-13 19:06:02
It was supposed to be her honeymoon. In 1840, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was twenty-four years old, and she and her new husband had travelled all the way to London from upstate New York to attend the World Anti-Slavery Convention, the first global meeting of abolitionists. But instead, the young bride was wandering the streets of London in the June heat, frustrated and distraught. On her arm was a little woman some two decades her senior, whom she’d met that day: Lucretia Mott, the famous abolitionist and Quaker preacher. Over the course of an afternoon, the women had become fast friends, in the way that can only happen between two people who are very angry about the same thing.
Several American women, including Mott, had been elected by U.S. abolitionist groups to serve as delegates to the convention. But when they arrived in London, the organizers, who were all men, had refused to seat them. Could women really advocate for liberty, they asked? Would including them make the cause look ridiculous? The women had been made to sit silently in the gallery while the male attendees debated whether they should be allowed to participate as equals. By a large majority, they voted against it. “I never felt more disappointed,” Stanton later wrote. Stanton was enraptured by the abolitionist women she was meeting in London, who, she observed with faint awe, “talk as those who had been accustomed to think.” How could all their passion and intellect be allowed to go to waste? How could her own?
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To understand Stanton, who became one of the most famous feminists of the nineteenth century, you have to keep in mind that injuries like this were formative. She was brilliant, relentless, and possessed of a pride that bordered on conceit. In a 2005 biography, Vivian Gornick referred to her “remarkably intact ego,” which might be a mild way of putting it. Mostly, Stanton’s sense of her own virtues made her bristle at all the great and petty indignities that characterized her place as a woman. “She truly felt herself to be a person of superior intelligence and courage,” the historian Ellen Carol DuBois writes in a new biography, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life.” “This did not so much put her above other women as focus her rage at men whom she considered unworthy to criticize her.”
In DuBois’s telling, Stanton’s ego can seem like a superpower. The sting of the London convention inspired her, almost a decade later, to write a manifesto modelled after the Declaration of Independence, which was her opening salvo in a long fight for women’s suffrage. Up until she died, at eighty-six, in 1902, Stanton wrote countless, often acerbic articles and petitions; gave speeches to crowds that often jeered and booed her; and issued exasperated testimonies before state legislatures that mostly ignored her pleas for suffrage and legal reform. She often campaigned while pregnant or postpartum after having one of her seven children, or when aching and fatigued in her old age. In an era when even the most basic of women’s rights were legally foreclosed and politically unpopular, her activism required the kind of persistence in the face of repeated disappointment that is best supported by a near-delusional self-regard.
But Stanton’s superiority also became her undoing. She struggled, in Gornick’s words, “with a reckless disposition to scorn and dismiss.” During Reconstruction, Stanton pushed for a constitutional amendment that would enfranchise all citizens, regardless of race or sex; when it became clear that few shared this ambition, and that the only politically feasible amendment would extend the vote to Black men alone, she expressed her disappointment in vivid, rageful, and slur-ridden terms. In London, she’d been perplexed at how a group of radicals committed to human equality could still succumb to prejudice. Later, many would ask the same thing about her.
A palpable sense of betrayal can be felt in recent histories by millennial feminists, who have taken on Stanton’s racism as a kind of original sin for the women’s-rights movement. Stanton features as a villain in Kyla Schuller’s “The Trouble with White Women,” Rafia Zakaria’s “Against White Feminism,” Koa Beck’s “White Feminism” (all from 2021), and Sophie Lewis’s “Enemy Feminisms” (2025). Beck detects traces of Stanton’s bigotry in racist incidents that occurred in the movement years after she died; Schuller argues that Stanton “invented white feminism,” though it might be more precise to say that the term “white feminism” was coined to describe figures like Stanton. To these critics, the pitfalls of feminist politics—that jealously guarded privileges of race and class keep women from uniting in the interests of their gender—are neatly symbolized in Stanton’s story.
These books were correctives to a tradition of feminist history that has often minimized Stanton’s wrongdoing in order to defend the movement more broadly—a tradition that DuBois, a distinguished research professor at U.C.L.A. and one of the foremost authorities on the early suffragists, comes from. (In the book’s introduction, she says she is in “the category of those who do not find the lessons of her entire legacy tainted by her prejudices.”) But DuBois has written a usefully ambivalent book, one that looks for a way to reconcile younger writers’ criticisms of Stanton with her own loyalty to the early women’s-rights activists. The author approaches her subject with the weariness of a long-suffering old friend, sighingly explaining Stanton’s tantrums to newcomers. What emerges is a portrait of Stanton not as a paragon of feminism but as a deeply peculiar person—one whose combination of vision and hubris happened to change history.
Stanton was born in 1815 in Johnstown, New York, the daughter of Margaret Livingston Cady and Daniel Cady, a wealthy conservative jurist. Daniel Cady, who served a term in Congress, delighted in his daughter’s precociousness, though her particular kind of aggressive intelligence was not encouraged among women of their upper-class milieu. “You should have been born a boy!” he often told Elizabeth. When a woman came to Cady seeking legal help after male relatives had taken possession of a house she had bought with her own money, Elizabeth, then around ten years old, overheard her father telling the woman that, under the law, nothing could be done. Elizabeth became so enraged that she tried to cut the offending statute out of her father’s reference book.
As a young woman, Stanton frequently visited her cousin Gerrit Smith, a militant abolitionist and an ally of John Brown, whose house in Peterboro, New York, was a hotbed for radical intellectuals. Newly out of school, Stanton was at first less interested in Smith’s ideas than she was attracted to the excitement and glamour of his circle. But her life changed one day in 1839, when Smith hurriedly ushered Stanton, her sister, and his daughter up to the third floor, saying that there was something serious and secret that he wanted them to see.
The secret turned out to be Harriet Powell, a fugitive from slavery on her way to Canada—Smith’s house was a stop on the Underground Railroad. At the time, Stanton was in her early twenties; Powell was about the same age. “For two hours we listened to the sad story of her childhood and youth, separated from all of her family and sold for her beauty,” Stanton wrote. “We all wept together as she talked.” Stanton recalled that she had asked Powell about what she called “the parallel condition of slaves and women,” and that Powell had responded, “Yes, but I am both. I am doubly damned in sex and color. Yes, in class too, for I am poor and ignorant.” Stanton left their conversation changed. “We needed no further education to make us earnest abolitionists,” she wrote.
As a child, Stanton’s primary caregiver had been Peter Teabout, a Black man she called a “manservant,” and who was almost certainly enslaved by her father. Maybe it was out of defiance of this, or perhaps penance, that Stanton threw herself into the movement against human bondage. Against her father’s wishes, she married Henry Stanton, a speaker on the abolitionist circuit. Elizabeth quickly made an impression on her husband’s friends; one of them, Angelina Grimké, wrote a letter remarking that Henry did not seem equipped to handle his intelligent young wife. (The pair eventually lived apart for the final years of their lives; Stanton became a passionate advocate for divorce reform.) The Stantons stood for a program of liberal legal advocacy in an era when some abolitionists were turning away from political participation altogether, hoping instead to end slavery through pure “moral suasion.” Elizabeth wrote forcefully about the need to wield the levers of power. “So long as we are to be governed by human laws, I should be unwilling to have the making & administering of those laws left entirely to the selfish & unprincipled part of the community,” she wrote in 1842. One gets the sense, reading DuBois, that Stanton’s fervor for political action stemmed from a dread of being governed by idiots.
Stanton cultivated a group of women-abolitionist friends, first at her and Henry’s home, in Boston, and then at a house that her father gave her along the new Erie Canal, in the western New York town of Seneca Falls. These women, including Mary Ann M’Clintock, Amelia Bloomer, and Martha Coffin Wright, provided a respite from the drudgery of child rearing. (“I may burst my boiler screaming to boys to come out of the cherry trees and to stop throwing stones,” Stanton wrote in an 1852 letter.) But Stanton differed from her peers in temperament and orientation: unlike many radical women of her time, she was steadfastly secular—an agnostic, at most. To justify her political commitments, she looked not to scripture but to the thinkers of the Enlightenment. Stanton’s mother’s family had been active in the American Revolution, and she began to extrapolate the principles of equality and self-government outlined by the Founders to the situation of women. Was the female citizen not entitled to shape the government whose laws she was subjected to? Was her exclusion from the political world not its own kind of tyranny?
One hot afternoon in Seneca Falls, in July, 1848, after Stanton had a particularly animated discussion about women’s status with a few of her friends, she decided to write these thoughts down. The result was what she called the Declaration of Sentiments, which stated in no uncertain terms that all men and women are created equal. Even now, the Declaration of Sentiments is a lucid and audacious document. It reveals as political what many took to be natural—the domination of men over women—and reconceptualizes women not as the frailer and more childlike half of humanity but as equals in dignity and intellect, a class of citizens who deserve the full privileges of that status. “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her,” Stanton wrote, not shying from accusation. More bold still was the Declaration’s conclusion: that women should vote.
The Seneca Falls convention where Stanton read her Declaration is now famous for sparking the women’s-suffrage movement, but it almost ended in disaster. First, no one had thought to make sure that the venue, a chapel in the middle of town, was unlocked. (Stanton had to commission a skinny teen-age nephew to shimmy in through a window.) Once they got in, it was by no means clear that the assembled crowd of reformers would support Stanton’s call for women’s right to vote. It was a wild, almost unheard-of notion; not even the bloody Jacobins of the French Revolution had been willing to countenance it. Lucretia Mott, the guest of honor, told Stanton that the issue was politically risky; she wasn’t willing to follow her there.
But one person in attendance was: Stanton’s friend Frederick Douglass. Stanton had met Douglass in Boston a few years before, when he had only recently escaped from slavery. He was one of the few people she esteemed to be her moral and intellectual equal; he was impressed by her contempt for racism, and had been converted to the cause of women’s rights by her encouragement. When Stanton shakily read her Declaration, the crowd seemed wary of the voting-rights point. It was Douglass, the only Black person at the gathering, who stood up and lent his support to the cause. No one wrote down what Douglass said that day, only that, after he spoke, the audience was persuaded. The first resolution calling for women’s suffrage was passed.
Word of the Seneca Falls convention spread far and fast through the press; even hostile newspapers reprinted Stanton’s Declaration. Women’s-rights meetings sprang up all over the country. State houses began considering, slowly and noncommittally, whether they should let married women hold property in their own name or collect their own wages. In that era, it was not always easy to tell where the abolitionist movement ended and the women’s-rights movement began, so dense was their cross-pollination of ideas and personalities. It was through her abolitionist circles that Stanton met Susan B. Anthony—a frail and severe younger woman, who matched in organization and diligence what Stanton had in enthusiasm and political vision—and it was Douglass whose advocacy helped popularize the women’s-rights cause. To Stanton, it seemed obvious that white women’s status at the bottom of one unjust hierarchy made them better able to understand the pain of Black people, who were at the bottom of a different one. “A privileged class can never conceive the feelings of those who are born to contempt, to inferiority, to degradation,” she said. “Herein is woman more fully identified with the slave than man can possibly be.”
In 1863, Stanton and Anthony formed the Women’s Loyal National League, an abolitionist group that collected a staggering near four hundred thousand signatures for a constitutional amendment to permanently end slavery. Stanton’s efforts helped create the political will to pass the Thirteenth Amendment. Before that, she had delivered abolitionist speeches around New York State, facing down angry, menacing mobs and travelling under the banner “No Compromise with Slaveholders: Immediate and Unconditional Emancipation.” When the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863, Stanton’s only concern was that it didn’t go far enough. “I must confess that the administration is too slow and politic to suit my straight-forward ideas of justice and vengeance,” she wrote. She was beginning to shed her pragmatism for an all-or-nothing approach.
A year after the Civil War ended, Stanton founded the American Equal Rights Association (A.E.R.A.), a national advocacy group that campaigned for the expansion of the franchise to all citizens, regardless of race or sex. In the radical reimagining of the nation that was under way in the early Reconstruction era, Stanton had assumed that many of her old abolitionist comrades would follow her into the fight for what she called “universal suffrage.” But, to her frustration, she found few takers. Men who had been passionate abolitionists either felt outright distaste at the prospect of women’s suffrage, or thought that it would be a fruitless political risk. Wendell Phillips, a onetime abolitionist ally, became a staunch opponent of Stanton’s women’s-suffrage push. He called their historical moment “the Negro’s Hour.” In her response, Stanton was livid and sarcastic. “May I ask you in reply to your fallacious letter just one question based on the apparent opposition in which you place the negro and the woman. My question is this: Do you believe the African race is composed entirely of males?”
It was in these years that suffragism transformed, in DuBois’s words, “from abolitionism’s junior partner to an autonomous, woman-directed movement,” with all of the complications that entailed. Part of what is depressing about the story of this period, when prominent Americans struggled over whether race or sex should be kept as a barrier to the franchise, is how rarely Black women are mentioned in their discussions. DuBois concedes that Stanton’s invocations of Black women, as in her letter to Phillips, were largely opportunistic—more a “gotcha” to her opponents than a genuine expression of solidarity. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a free-born poet from Baltimore who was then one of the nation’s most famous women writers, was one of the A.E.R.A.’s few Black women officials. Black women were not often asked their opinions on the debate, but we have hers: “When it was a question of race,” she “let the lesser question of sex go.”
As Stanton realized that Reconstruction would not enfranchise women, she began to think less about what the vote could do than who was worthy of it—and specifically, why Black and immigrant men were less worthy of it than she was. She was becoming influenced by social scientists such as the French philosopher Auguste Comte, who were less concerned with enshrining individual rights than with imposing a social order—a departure from her earlier universalist thinking. In speeches and writing, Stanton began to depict the potential enfranchisement of immigrants and freedmen as a cataclysm that could endanger “daughters of Jefferson and Washington” such as herself. “Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung . . . making laws for Lucretia Mott,” she said in one particularly nasty rant, conjuring slurs for Irishmen, Black men, and German and Chinese immigrants. “The more frequently her great hopes for a revolution in women’s status were blocked,” DuBois writes, “the more she shifted back to more familiar hierarchies and prejudices.”
The contemporary flattening of Stanton into an avatar of white feminism might suggest that her racism was representative of her peers. This undersells the singular malignance of her outbursts, which drove away Black and white allies alike. In January, 1869, at a meeting of an interracial advocacy group called the Universal Franchise Association, Stanton issued a diatribe about how the country risked placing “educated refined women . . . in the humiliating position of supplicants at the feet of serfs, peasants, plantation slaves, paupers knaves drunkards, all the ragged ignorant foreign and native riff raff in the country.” Word of Stanton’s comments spread through an outraged suffrage community. Not long after, Mott quit her leadership position in the A.E.R.A.
Stanton’s nadir came in May of that year, when the organization met for its annual convention in New York. The Fifteenth Amendment, which would formally grant the vote to Black men, but not to any women, was at the top of the agenda. Most members supported the amendment: Lucy Stone, a Boston-based suffragist, declared that she would be happy if “any body can get out of the terrible pit.” Stanton opposed it, and urged the group to hold out for a universal-suffrage law, though no such amendment was forthcoming. Douglass stood from the audience to rebuke his old friend; many others joined him. The A.E.R.A. erupted in outrage against its embattled, embittered founder.
The controversy over Stanton’s positions split the women’s-rights movement: Stone led a more cautious and incrementalist suffrage push that focussed on state legal reforms, while Stanton and Anthony charged ahead with an aggressive and ambitious national campaign. But a divided movement was inevitably a diminished one. As Stanton grew older, she never gave up her demand for the vote—she successfully cast a ballot and got herself arrested and criminally tried for it—yet her thought drifted further into ideas of human hierarchy. Stanton’s disdain for immigrants led her into emergent realms of pseudoscience that would transform into eugenics; her rhetoric about women strayed from the principle of gender equality into essentialist ideas about women’s feminine specialness. In time, even her daughter the suffragist campaigner Harriot Blatch grew sick of her.
One of the more uncanny experiences of DuBois’s book is swinging between the civic utopianism of Stanton’s Declaration and abolitionist writings, and the vile bigotry that she displayed later. It is nearly impossible to read it without indulging a bit of counterfactual ideation: to wish that Stanton would take back her racist remarks, that she would reconcile with her comrades who had supported the Fifteenth Amendment, that the women’s and Black freedom struggles would be reunited. Perhaps both movements could have animated each other; perhaps the subsequent fight for women’s suffrage would have been less sporadic and slow. When contemporary feminists insist on disposing of Stanton and purging the movement of her influence, they are not just disavowing her racism but wishing for a history less riven by contradiction and betrayal. They want a better past—one in which the righteousness of the feminist cause to be was matched by moral uprightness in its leaders.
It’s true that Stanton’s contributions to feminism were so significant, and her lapses so grave, that her life would seem a referendum on the movement itself. But it might also help us to remember her as someone who thought her life’s great project was failing. We look at Stanton now with the privilege of hindsight, knowing that votes for women were inevitable, but, in her life, she had no such assurances. In 1892, when Stanton was seventy-six, she addressed the National Woman Suffrage Association in her final speech as the group’s president, which she called “The Solitude of Self,” in which she proposed suffrage as a remedy to the isolation of human existence, comparing each life to a ship cast out upon a stormy sea. “It matters not whether the solitary voyager is man or woman,” Stanton said. “Nature having endowed them equally, leaves them to their own skill and judgment in the hour of danger, and, if not equal to the occasion, alike they perish.” It was a vivid argument for the sovereignty of the singular soul; it also suggested that Stanton, in her old age, was growing lonely. Perhaps she realized that she had not been quite equal to the occasion herself. ♦
